Subject: Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile."
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 30 Sep 2002 16:31:53 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3242392313780400@naggum.no>

* Tim Bradshaw
| Manual-inches, incidentally, is the best known unit.

  I tend to measure things by the weight and thickness of the paper and the
  spaciousness of the typography of the books you find on the market about
  something.  I have seen books on Visual Basic with the same page count as
  books on C but with 3 times the shelf space.  I have seen books on HTML with
  same amount of contents as books on Ada with 9 times the volume.  I have come
  to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and
  oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader.
  If the reader is expected to be unable to concentrate or experiences mental
  fatigue just by looking at a page of text without oceans of whitespace, the
  material is probably geared towards people whose reading skills plateaued
  before they entered high school.  Compare children's books and books on Web
  Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books.  If the reading level of a specification
  is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the
  result morose.

  If typography and reading level are comparable, manual-inches is probably a
  good measure, but a children's specification for something may be thinner
  than a solid work of engineering that it would actually take less time to
  grasp because it is so hard to sink to the level of children who need to be
  told things over and over and usually do not remeber subtle differences from
  repetition to repetion like reasonably smart people do.  (At least I find
  that I cannot read material written by people who are too stupid.  This was,
  incidentally, how I first began to understand that sports in the newsmedia is
  /intended/ to keep people in a semi-comatose, non-thinking state of mind
  where cheering for some idiot gang of testosterone bombs could be regarded as
  recreationally rewarding.)

-- 
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder.
Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.